Do you have a fire in your belly? Don't be intimidated by "personal branding." Your personal brand can be a dragon!
I’m a mermaid, and that’s what I’ve wanted to be since I was five. It’s also my personal brand.
This goes from the name my boyfriend calls me (Mermaid) to the title of my personal travel website MermaidChronicles.com. It has been proudly displayed on my business card since my senior year of college, and has served as a compelling way for me to network.
This has been key to my success.
I’ve never said I was a literal mermaid in a cover letter or resume, but I have been very clear about everything that “mermaid” connotes to me: creativity, thinking outside the box, fearlessness, playfulness, ability to be versatile. Those have been the true assets that I can bring to any company or employer, and this has been how I market myself.
Yet branding is scary to recent graduates. Jill Marcellus, a 2010 graduate from Barnard College, calls the process of choosing your brand “an existential crisis.” I can see why: trying to express yourself in the lingo of the working world is a whole new process of discovery,
But here’s the thing: your brand can be a mermaid. What in life ever allows you be a mermaid?
Here’s your branding exercise for the day: think about what you wanted to be when you were five years old. Whether this was an astronaut, Minotaur, or lion, chances are it says a lot about your image and who you want to be even now, when you’re all grown up.
Write down the characteristics of that thing that were so alluring to you. Then, translate that into business language. Was the freedom of the little mermaid compelling? That equals versatility. Was the bravery of a lion captivating? That equals fearlessness. This can be the image you can cultivate now, in a more grown up way.
After reading your resume and interviewing you, a hiring manager should have such a clear picture of your brand, that handing them a business card saying you are a mermaid, astronaut, or lion isn’t weird, it just makes sense.
That’s ultimately how you can differentiate yourself from the dozens of other job applicants vying for the same position, as Darcie Brooks did when applying for her first job in PR. After the interview, she sent a thank you letter that said, “”I enjoyed meeting you and hope you will seriously consider hiring me. After all, I have a fire in my belly.” She also included a picture of a fire-breathing dragon. She got hired, right away.
I would love to hear the results of your branding exercise. What did you want to be when you were five? How can that translate to your “brand?” Please share in the comments section below.
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“Get in off that porch! She’s only five!” My mother shouted to my father and I as we waited for the arrival of the dreaded alert, “TORNADO.” Frasier, a suburb of Memphis, in Tennessee heralded the visitor several times a year in the early spring and in the middle of winter. My father’s interest in severe weather never disturbed me as we kept our watch any time he was home from driving the truck on his route between Memphis and Shreveport. Being an amateur radio operator was part of what he did as well. How are these connected? Things finally came together for me as I, when I was older, listened to the arrangements that were made to assist the people who had just lost everything on the Gulf Coast to that hateful woman, Hurricane Camille. Several years passed before I realized that that ‘woman’ as I had understood the storm to be was a situation of a severity that was only surpassed in my experience in 2005 in Canton, MS. Radio fascinated me. So much that I found a way with my interest in the bizarre, such as UFOs, I was able to land myself appearances from time to time on WWEE Radio, with such announcers as Tony Delany and Marge Thrasher. Many years, and my travels, and appearances on stages through the world as a singer never deterred me from looking around me and trying to learn what the world was about. That childhood fascination with storms never left. Sitting on my mother’s bed several years ago, I kept vigil as the news anchor spoke the words that chills me still. The hurricane has made landfall. I wasn’t to know until very late that night that all the fascination I held for the coast, from Biloxi to Gulfport was gone, just simply wiped away. Not there, and as if it had never been. With still very destructive winds, Hurrican Katrina took a similar path to Camille’s, pounding my city with Hurricane winds of Category 1, quite a feat for a storm that hit the coast that morning with a Hurricane force of Cat 3. I deemed myself to find a way to learn culinery, so with the next disaster I could go down there and feed the people. Funny how life seems to have built in complications. After a year in culinary and tourism, my back kept me from keeping that vow to my aunt, that I would become her personal chef. Still, the storms kept fascinating me. I kept looking out the window, and what of my career? Well, I keep my eyes to the skies, keeping the vigil that my father had taught me when I was four, back in 1958, and now, in 2010, I am studying my way to become a professional meteorologist, with an expertise in severe weather. And what of the radio? I am KE5TZC, StormDogg, with my ‘nose for weather’ assisting anyone I can by tracking storms and keeping up with weather, and hopes that someday, I can join the greats on Weather Radio, and on the Weather Channel to keep the world informed. Who knows, maybe you’ll here me say, “This is StormDogg, with your current forecast. We have a storm building in the eastern Atlantic….”
Wow, an amazing story! I see how what you wanted to be when you were five really did lead to life long dreams– literally. Thanks for sharing your experience
I love your post–and that you are a mermaid! I completely get it. Right after college I didn’t really know what to do with myself and all my crazy my of skills and knowledge and years of education–and neither did any employers. so what helped? I read some biz books and learned the language of business, and how to present all the things I was good at in terms of communications capital in the workplace. And Voila! I became someone who could do almost anything to align communications to corp strategy, that became my brand–a consultant/designer/a lot of other things–from creative concept development to strategy, and video producer to career coach, etc. What once made me seem unfocused now makes me a “Rainmaker!”
Thanks for sharing that story. It’s true, college doesn’t always give you that business vocabulary– I remember reading job descriptions when I was a senior in college and totally thinking they were writing in esoteric code. It’s all about translating your image– mermaid or whatever– into business words.
Do you have any good books that I can suggest to my readers about where to begin?
Thanks for stopping by!
Lauren
Inspired by this story, I immediately began racking my brain to figure out what it was I wanted to be when I was five years old. Nothing. Nada. Negative. Okay, no problem. Let’s try six. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Seven? Blank. Eight? Uh-uh. Nine, Ten, Eleven? Sorry. Oh dear. Self image, we have a problem.
Either my memory is terrible or perhaps I never really wanted to be anything. Well, that’s just sad and, frankly, unacceptable. Undeterred, I decided to take a more collective, retrospective approach to this my amnesic branding dilemma. I tried to paint some broad brush strokes using my own historical pallet, from which I could then extract salient themes.
Looking back upon three plus decades of hobbies and haunts, pleasantries and peccadilloes, likes, loves, and lessons, a recurring behavioral trend began to emerge. I realized that I was then and am now a people pleaser. A people pleaser? That’s not a very powerful and sexy brand. In the coliseum of life I would back a Minotaur, lion, or even a mermaid before a people pleaser. This alter-ego simply will not do, I thought. So, I set out to rebrand my brand.
What, I asked myself, is the comic-hero equivalent to a people-pleaser? After some deliberation it occurred to me that I, that is to say my brand, could be tied to a very powerful mythology—a powerful phenotype featured in some of today’s most popular pop culture phenomenon, adding color and mystique to wildly successful franchises such as “X-Men” and “Heroes.” If people-pleaser was my Clark Kent, then shape-shifter was and is my Superman. I am the shape shifter known as Dave. Shape Shifter Dave or SSD for short.
Success! While I may not have known, at the tender age of five, that I wanted to become a shape shifter, let alone any other creature of mythical proportions, here and now at the tender age of much-older-than-five I had figured it out. But, what does it mean? How does one practically apply this post formative brand identification?
In the course of this commentary it occurred to me that a shape shifter is someone who is, at his or her core, adaptable. A shape shifter can roll with the punches. A shape shifter can blend seamlessly into nearly any environment. A shape shifter can assimilate, communicate, and integrate, or, in the words of the unofficial mantra of the U.S. Marine Corps, “improvise, adapt, and overcome,” only in my case sans fatigues, combat boots, and automatic weapons. A shape shifter can thrive into today’s uber-competitive, always-on, need-it-now, instant-access environment of nanosecond variability.
Hello world. I am Shape Shifter Dave and I am at your service.
Shape Shifter Dave. I like it. In fact, that’s inspiration enough for me to revise my brand “mermaid” to include a few more adjective and some catchy alliteration. I’ll have to brainstorm and post a follow up.
I enjoyed following your thought process, and loved the leap you made from shape shifter dave to your business brand. That leap is the crux of creativity, connecting two disparate things– myth with business– in a logical way. So add innovation to your brand, as well.
Thanks for the awesome advice! I am a senior in advertising at the University of Alabama, and I recently took a corporate branding class in which we talked about mantra geniuses such as Nike, Disney, Starbucks etc. What you have presented makes perfect sense. After all, who doesn’t like to laugh? From everything I have read about self branding and hiring, it is all about 1. Who you know and 2. How you present yourself.
If you haven’t read it yet, I’d suggest to check out Scott Bedbury’s book “A New Brand World”
Also, I had the privilege to attend a session with professional headhunter Skip Freeman and check out his insightful book “‘Headhunter’ Hiring Secrets: The Rules of the Hiring Game Have Changed . . . Forever!” It provides some great ideas of how to market yourself to employers correctly and professionally.
Hi Brian,
Thanks for sharing those reads- will definitely have to check them out. Awesome that you’re getting the exposure to all of this while you’re still in school, a lot of students don’t even hear about branding until they’re in the depths of their first job search (like me!).
Have you started forming your brand yet?
One book that I recently began reading is “It’s Your Ship.” Not only does it explain how to organize yourself, but how to delegate.